 The development of at least free effective COVID vaccines has finally given us a route out of this COVID-induced hell-hole with a steadily increasing body count and seemingly endless restrictions. It has also proven wrong the lockdown skeptics who said there was no point in suppressing COVID-19 because we ultimately have to learn to live with it and the only way we can get through this crisis is to let coronavirus run slowly through the population so we all get natural herd immunity. This was initially adopted by the government. We spoke a lot on this show about how that was risky and crazy and terrible and deadly and incredibly irresponsible, but they changed their tune sort of quite early on. But there's still been a cabal of people who are really, really anti-lockdown who say no, this is a big mistake. They've sort of gathered around this thing called the Barrington Declaration, the Great Barrington Declaration, and they say all of these lockdowns are a mistake. We should let this virus slowly move through people so that we get herd immunity. This has included people in the spectator, the telegraph, as well as Rishi Sunak. Actually, this is why he constantly wanted to reopen things. But even now, you would expect that given the vaccine is here, the fact that there's a vaccine which is about to come on stream, well, it already has come on stream, actually, it's already been rolled out. That would make you think, OK, no, actually, we probably should have a lockdown or something similar to that, at least severe restrictions for the next two months, because then we can have actual, you know, not naturally induced herd immunity, vaccine-induced herd immunity and stop lots of deaths. I assume some people are rolling back from that, but not everyone. So one of the ideologues, who even though a vaccine is here still wants to let coronavirus run riot through the population in the meantime, is Julia Hartley, Brewer Talk Radio host. Here she is on question time last night. Yes, I think people should take more personal responsibility. But I would like that to be in place of having restrictions on people's right to use their personal judgment and common sense. I mean, this has constantly talked about good old British common sense and personal responsibility. So how would that work in practice? How would that work in practice? That would work in practice in that we would actually trust that people will actually do the right thing, because most people have actually been following the rules. He mentions that, you know, a few people aren't wearing masks. We don't know the reason why those people weren't wearing masks. I see people on the London Tube every day, odd people not wearing masks. The vast majority are. The vast majority of publicans, vast majority of restaurants, shops, people going into them, people going about their daily lives in their workplaces, are actually doing very, very sensible things. They're doing it because they want to keep themselves, their colleagues, their family members, their friends, people who pass in the street, they want to keep them safe. So why do you think infections are rising then? Why do infections are rising? Because we have a virus which is now endemic and the virus, if you look at the patterns of this pandemic, in every single country in the world, whether you compare Sweden, which didn't have a formal lockdown at all, and did rely on personal responsibility, or Peru, which locked down for months and months on end, not even allowing men and women out of their homes on the same day. We have seen exactly the same curve. The areas where we are seeing the virus rising infection rates at the moment are the areas that weren't hit back in spring before we locked down. We are in wind months. Well, it's rising in London. London was very bad, I guess. It's rising in London in the boroughs that were not badly hit before the lockdown. If you look at the actual granular data, it's rising in only in the areas... Hey, for instance, it's not actually rising at very large levels in anywhere else that was hit much earlier in the year. The reality is that we have got a vaccine. We should be making sure we're absolutely protecting the vulnerable. Those who are over 70, those who are under 70 with underlying health conditions. But in my view, we should not be having restrictions on shops opening or closing, on pubs or restaurants. There's no evidence whatsoever that any of these particular places are causing rise of infections. On the contrary, lots of evidence that actually when you have a lockdown, as Wales did, and are planning to again, or when you have a lockdown as England did for four weeks, you actually end up increasing the problem afterwards. They don't solve anything. They don't break any circuits. They don't break any fires. All they do is delay the problem. I think we should rely on adults in this country to entrust their personal judgment about keeping themselves and other people safe, and as they have been doing anyway, and allow people to go about their normal daily lives as much as possible. That was Julie Hartley-Brure on Question Time. Unfortunately, there wasn't an epidemiologist to debunk her, although Anand Menon, a Brexit expert, did a decent job of it. We're going to go through that point by point because there was so much nonsense said there, so much which was just factually untrue, that we're going to debunk it point by point. Before we do that, Julie Hartley-Brure is not the only Murdoch-employed stooge that we have to, I suppose, well, debunk to prove wrong on this show. So if you want to see us do it more often, do hit that subscribe button. We're going to watch that again going through point by point. We're going to stop it every time she tells a poor key. Yes, I think people should take more personal responsibility, but I would like that to be in place of having restrictions on people's right to use their personal judgment and common sense. I mean, this has constantly talked about good old British common sense and personal responsibility. So how would that work in practice? How would that work in practice? That would work in practice in that we would actually trust that people will actually do the right thing, because most people have actually been following the rules. He mentions that, you know, a few people aren't wearing masks. We don't know the reason why those people weren't wearing masks. I see people on the London Tube every day, odd people not wearing masks. The vast majority are. The vast majority of publicans, vast majority of restaurants, shops, people going into them, people going about their daily... So her argument there is we should rely on personal responsibility and her proof of that. So personal responsibility instead of sort of government dictates. Just saying the proof of that is that most people wear masks. Now, I don't know, she might have a short memory, but I don't know if anyone else remembers the first two months of this pandemic, where there was a period where the government was saying, actively, don't wear masks, but then there was a period where they were saying, we actually think it is a good idea to wear a mask. But when I walked around the part of London that I live in, in Hackney, people weren't wearing masks. And I don't think that was because they were selfish. I think that was because essentially, there was a collective action problem. And I felt it as well. If I walked into a shop where no one was wearing a mask, I felt a bit weird if I was wearing a mask, because you almost feel like by wearing a mask, you're making a judgment about them. And you feel like you've walked into their space and you're making a judgment about them by wearing a mask. Now, and where I was before it was made mandatory, about 80% of people weren't wearing masks. It was rare. People looked at you a bit weird if you wore a mask. Then what happened is the government said, actually, this is mandatory. And suddenly everyone wore masks. It was a collective action problem. Everyone was waiting for other people to wear masks, to wear masks. So she is using the fact that we wear masks now as a reason why we don't need actual government regulations about this. No, the reason we wear masks is because there were government regulations. Let's continue. So their workplaces are actually doing very, very sensible things. They're doing it because they want to keep themselves, their colleagues, their family members, their friends. People who pass in the street, they want to keep them safe. So why do you think infections are rising then? Why do infections are rising? Because we have a virus which is now endemic. And the virus, if you look at the patterns of this pandemic, in every single country in the world, whether you compare Sweden, which didn't have a formal lockdown at all and did rely on personal responsibility, or Peru, which locked down for months and months not even allowing men and women out of their homes on the same day. We have seen exactly the same curve. So she's saying, wherever you are, lockdown or no lockdown, we've seen exactly the same curve. And you'll notice that what's a bit suspicious is she chose two very specific examples. So as her example as to why we see exactly the same curve everywhere, whatever the policy, lockdown or no lockdown, she chooses Sweden and Peru. Now Sweden is, that's the argument, that's the example she likes. So they didn't really have lockdown. They did have some restrictions and they gave people a hell of a lot of advice about not gathering indoors, but they didn't have a lockdown. But I mean, Sweden, one thing they do have is very good public support. So people did get paid to stay at home. Also lots of people live alone, but it didn't go very well there anyway. We'll get onto that in a moment. The other example she uses is Peru. Now Peru has one of the worst deference in the world, if not the worst. I think it might be the worst per capita. And the reason they're locked down didn't work is because the government didn't have enough resources to allow people to stay at home. Big informal economy, people didn't really have any choice but to go to work. That's why it didn't work. But more importantly than this, this is kind of details because the main problem with that is she ignores most of the world. She ignores most of the world where strong public health measures stopped almost anyone dying from it. China, South Korea, Vietnam. And the most obvious example, or the most obvious thing to look at to show why that is complete nonsense, why she just plucked out of the air to actually quite unique examples is we can compare Sweden to its neighbors. Now we bring up this graph every now and then. We update it every time. But we brought up this graph a few times because so often people compare Sweden to countries which aren't really relevant to it. Peru, completely different socioeconomic system. So it would make more sense if what we're judging is do lockdowns work, is to judge two societies which are very similar but where one introduced a lockdown and where one or another, sorry, didn't. And we can do that here. We can look at all the Scandinavian nations. This is showing you the cumulative deaths from COVID-19. And you can see there, Sweden, very, very high. 700 deaths per million people. They didn't have a lockdown. They adopted a fairly unique policy which was to say we're not gonna have lockdowns. We're gonna try and get herd immunity. They explicitly argued for this. Their chief epidemiologist said, that's what we're trying to do. They predicted that, yes, we'll have more deaths in the first wave but other countries will have more deaths in the second wave because they won't have herd immunity. Look at this graph, Sweden. Five times more deaths in the first wave. And then in the second wave, again, they've got twice as many deaths, at least twice as many deaths in the second wave. So this doesn't work. Her idea that lockdown or no lockdown, you get the same policy outcome does not work if you compare the Scandinavian nations. Finally, it's also worth noting that. And this, again, is where it comes in that she's not responding to evidence. It's a complete disregard of the evidence in front of her eyes so that she cannot admit that she was wrong because the people who are admitting they were wrong, she was using again Sweden as the example of people who didn't have a lockdown, they weren't any worse than anywhere else. Who's disagreeing with this? The Swedes, right? So there's actually a bit of a rebellion going on among the top epidemiologists in that country saying a mistake was made. It is written up in this telegraph article. So again, this is the newspaper that was most anti-lockdown. They're now reporting that all the Swedes have changed their mind, awkward. We can get up a quote from Annika Lind. So she served as state epidemiologist. That's their top epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013. And that was when the current guy, Anders Tegner, he's the architect of the herd immunity policy, took on the job. And so she told the telegraph last month, wishful thinking. When you don't believe in the worst scenario has been guiding Swedish decisions too much. The Swedish authorities have been slow all the time instead of being proactive. They've run after the virus and the virus has been able to spread too much before they take action. Not even the Swedes are defending the Swedish model, but still, when a virus is about to be rolled out, Julie Hartley-Burr is saying, no, let's not have any lockdowns. Let's let the virus run through the population. Infection rates at the moment are the areas that weren't hit back in spring before we locked down. We are, we're in wind months. Well, it's rising in London. London was very bad, I guess. It's rising in London in the boroughs that were not badly hit before the lockdown. If you look at the actual granular data, it's rising in only in areas, like Havering, for instance. It's not actually rising at very large levels in anywhere else that was hit much earlier in the year. So she is actually half right there. So the boroughs which are being most hard hit now aren't necessarily the same boroughs which are being most hard hit in the first part of the pandemic. So if you look at the deaths up to the 1st of May, so that's the first wave, people who died in the first wave proper, in Newham you had 144.3 deaths per 100,000. That was the borough with the highest death rate. In Brent it was 141 per 100,000 and in Hackney it was 127 per 100,000. So it was especially the poorer inner London boroughs who were hit hardest. Now it's the poorer outer London boroughs who are being hit hardest. So the top three now are Havering, Barking and Dagenham and Redbridge. Though it's worth noting, Newham is still six. So Newham had the highest death rate back in the first wave. Now they've got the sixth highest death rate. That's out of 32. So this idea that you don't get hit twice doesn't work that well. But even if it did, the problem with this argument is that we've got a vaccine literally being rolled out now. In two months time, most of the people who are at the highest risk of dying from COVID-19 will be vaccinated. But Julia Hartley-Bruer for some reason wants to see the same level of deaths that we saw in the first wave in certain London boroughs. Now, when we could just avoid them by having restrictions until the vaccine comes into place. And the argument essentially amounts to this. 1 in 700 people died in Newham in spring. And so if you're saying, oh, don't worry, you won't get hit twice. Even Newham did get hit twice, by the way. But even if you didn't get hit twice, she's saying, so that we can go into shops for two months, let's let 1 in 700 people die in the boroughs that weren't hard hit the first time around. This argument, again, I would disagree with this argument if there wasn't a vaccine around the corner. But with a vaccine around the corner, it's crazy. I would be embarrassed to be saying this on national television. We have got a vaccine. We should be making sure we're absolutely protecting the vulnerable. Those who are over 70, those who are under 70 with underlying health conditions. But in my view, we should not be having restrictions on shops opening or closing, on pubs or restaurants. There's no evidence whatsoever that any of these particular places are causing rise of infections. On the contrary, lots of evidence. Actually, when you have a lockdown, as Wales did, and are planning to again, or when you have a lockdown, as England did for four weeks, you actually end up increasing the problem afterwards. They don't solve anything. They don't break any circuits. They don't break any fires. All they do is delay the problem. I think we should rely on adults in this country to entrust their personal judgment about keeping themselves and other people safe. And as they have been doing anyway, and allow people to go about their normal daily lives as much as possible. A combination of untroves and completely faulty logic. So let's start with the untroves. You're saying there's no evidence people catch COVID in restaurants and shops. Now, there's very strong evidence people catch COVID in restaurants. The CDCs at the American Disease Control Center, they've argued that that's one of the key places where people get coronavirus. I mean, epidemiologists around the world are saying that actually because you've got people in an enclosed space who can't wear masks because you're eating, they are places where people catch COVID. But there's also clear evidence for this, right? Which is what happened when England closed its restaurants and shops? You've got here the number of people who are testing positive for COVID every day. You can see that's rising very dramatically from the start of September. That's partly because schools are opening, partly because it's winter, so people are spending more time inside. Now, from that point on, you've got the number of people getting coronavirus rising very, very dramatically. So it's from in the sort of 1,000 a day, all the way up to 25,000 a day. What starts sending that in the other direction? Lockdown being announced, people's behavior changes a bit from them, and lockdown starting. That's when the curve goes down. The curve goes down because shops and restaurants and pubs were closed. That's why it went down. So she's saying lockdowns don't work, but look at this, they obviously work. This graph does not lie. The second point, the fault of logic that she's given, so there's one sort of mistruth there, saying that people don't catch it and restaurants is no evidence, there is evidence. The fault of logic is she's saying we shouldn't have restrictions because it only delays the problem. Maybe there's something I've missed here because it seems that I'm so, what I'm thinking here is so out of step with what she's felt plausible to say on national television that maybe I've got this completely wrong. But when you've got a vaccine which is currently being rolled out, which in about two months will have been rolled out to most of the highly vulnerable people in this country, then isn't precisely the thing we want to do is delay the problem. Because if we delay the problem, if we have it now, if we have a huge wave of coronavirus now, then we'll have tens more thousands of people die. If we have a wave of coronavirus in two months, then I mean, deaths might be in their hundreds. If we loosen all of these restrictions in six months, no one will die because we'll all be completely inoculated. But ultimately, we have to wait about two months before the most vulnerable people are vaccinated. Darlia, I want to bring you in on this because am I going crazy? Or is what she is saying on television so out there? One, because all of the scientific facts were basically false, but two, all these steps of logic, why would we delay coronavirus when we got a vaccine two months away? It doesn't make any sense. It's absolutely unhinged. For all the reasons that you outlined, it's unhinged, it's dangerous. It's irresponsible. I don't understand in what frame of mind she is able to come up with this. I don't know if it comes from her own sense that whatever happens, she'll be fine. Maybe it comes from wanting to see her rich mates being able to keep making money by sending their employees in and making their employees work. Maybe it's just the clicks. Maybe it's just to kind of be controversial and to kind of get us to talk about her. I don't know, but I think firstly, not only you've done such a good job of unpacking and debunking all of that, but it's like herd immunity doesn't work on a virus when you only have immunity for three months. So, okay, we have herd immunity for three months and then everyone just gets reinfected again. And also the key thing about the lockdown is it's not just about mandating people to follow particular regulations. It's also about providing financial relief and the infrastructure for people to keep themselves safe. So if we were to say, okay, let people decide for themselves what they do. Okay, we'll say there was a situation where you're a worker, you work in a pub, you work in a shop, you work in an office and it's your personal, your common sense tells you that you shouldn't be going into work because 600 people are dying a day from an airborne virus. And offices, pubs, restaurants, these are all places that are kind of really hotbeds for transmission of this virus, right? So you make that decision alongside your common sense. Your employer's common sense is like, no, I think that you should come into work. What happens then? And who pays your wages if you get fired or if your boss decides not to pay you because they think that you should come into work but you don't think that you should. It's about creating a kind of infrastructure that we're all on the same page and that that's kind of like a formalized process for supporting people to stay at home and to keep themselves safe. Not that this government has done that particularly well anyway, but this should honestly disqualify her from serious public discussion. This constant conspiratorial, deluded, dangerous opposition to and violation of the clear scientific evidence and the fact that this is going to rile people up and contribute to what we were mentioning earlier about the fact that people are becoming really lax with these rules and we are seeing a human cost to that. And really, it's laughable to me that question time and major radio stations consistently air this and yet are so hesitant to position themselves critically in relationship to the government and in relationship to how this response is going as we've outlined earlier on in the show. Absolutely. I mean, I'm not really in favor of saying, oh, they shouldn't be on TV to say this because it might offend blah, blah, blah. But here, I mean, question time is a flagship show and if you're gonna have her on saying that, you have to have an epidemiologist on who can say literally everything you just said was wrong. You have to challenge her more than possibly. Because this isn't, that wasn't a matter of opinion, that was science. Yeah, and this isn't a matter of offense. This is a matter of you are encouraging people to do something that will put people's lives at risk. It's not a fence. It's not an opinion, as you mentioned. It's irresponsible and it's not factual and you're gonna have to do a much better job than Fiona Bruce did of really shutting that down if you're going to insist on having her on. But I feel like Julia Hartley-Brueha showed us that she has absolutely no respect for the truth. So I don't understand why, she's consistently platformed in this way. It's not like, okay, we can't let her on because she's offensive. I mean, she is offensive in multiple ways but it's also a matter of, this is someone who has such a giant public platform and uses it so irresponsibly. There is something, especially, I suppose, morally repugnant about being so disregarding of the truth in the middle of a pandemic. I mean, I think it's one of the reasons why some people turned off Donald Trump who'd originally voted for him, because it's just like, you know, there's a pandemic that's literally killing people and what you say matters, it guides people's behavior and we can all see you don't believe what you're saying, but you're saying it anyway. And that does sort of speak to a real moral vacuum going on there. If you know that you're going on television to say something that's untrue because it's boosting your profile or whatever and you know that you're saying this untruth is going to cause people to risk their lives or risk other people's lives more importantly, then yeah, that says something not very nice about you, I think.